<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by daniellam:
Has anyone here bought one of those 42-day advanced purchase / Saturday night stay "I" class fares to the UK from the US (ILAPUS and IHAPUS)?
USD 3000 approx.
It seems like that VS and a few other carriers are also offering these kind of fares (DLAP42 and DHAP42).
If given a choice, would you prefer to fly VS or BA?
Anyone know why Jun-Aug is considered "low season" and other times "high season" for these cheap business class fares?
[This message has been edited by daniellam (edited Jan 13, 2004).]</font>
I don't know about VS, but I'd prefer to fly in business US-LHR for around or even less than $1000, plus 25000 miles (which is in fact the cost if you book WT+ and upgrade using BA miles). You get 15000 BA miles for $85 (once) by getting a BA Visa, and you can buy 15000 miles (each year?) for $400ish, so as long as there's capacity (the upgrades are capacity controlled, but then I bet these sale prices are too!), and even if you have no "no cost" ways of earning those 25000 miles, it seems that 25000 miles should not cost the $2000ish price difference between the cash price and the pay+upgrade price.
(Oh, I just remembered, I'd prefer to fly BA if my real distantion was BRU, which it most often is, simply because they actually fly there! Despite the fact that Virgin Atlantic's intra-Europe sister airline, Virgin Express, is BASED at BRU, you can't fly Virgin from the US through to BRU!!!)
Anyhow, on the why-the-sale issue: It has been noticed elsewhere (there's a thread in MilesBuzz about this right now) that many people who are looking for the "lowest" fare don't check all classes, and meanwhile business or first class fares are targeted at people who would normally book them, but might want to do so for a bit less. So there have definitely been cases intra-US where first class seats were on sale short-term in certain markets for less than many economy seats on the same flight! Unless you use a fare search engine that shows all fares in ALL CLASSES at once like:
http://www.thestoremaker.com/cgit/po...ntid=aircenter
(select All for the Class, then Search by Fare), you'd be hard pressed to spot these except by accident (unless you spend a LOT of time doing your fare searches), as at all too many fare search sites (whether airline specific or not) you have to choose the class on the first screen, and then go through several other screens before you see the fare, and so you have to back up lots of screens to try another class. This is especially tedious on ba.com!